Business of the House

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Iain Duncan Smith

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am terribly sorry, but I will not give way, because I have promised to give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green and then to sit down.

[Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, with whom I served in government for a positive period of time. I gently chide him on his previous comments about colleagues changing their minds. He knows very well that we all change our minds when we are in government, because we curse the very fact that we are delayed by the Speaker for urgent questions—you were one of those too, Mr Speaker. Now that we are here, we all praise the Speaker because we are not in government and we think it is an excellent idea. You were with me on that as well, Mr Speaker. I say gently that it never does to criticise colleagues for changing their minds. I think it is a habitual point in this House that we somehow forget what we said before.

On my right hon. Friend’s motion, I am little confused about how he thinks this procedure will follow from the House of Lords. I think he expects it to take precedence over everything else. Does he anticipate that this House might reject some amendments and, if so, how does he see this happening the second time around? Would it still have the same precedence?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

The answer is yes it would, but I do not anticipate that that is at all likely. My sense, for what it is worth, is that although the House of Lords procedures are arcane and it is impossible to determine from the outside the time that will be taken, there is very substantial support for the Bill there, and it is therefore very unlikely that anything other than technical amendments, which might be wholly welcome, would come back, and they would therefore be accepted. I do not think that is an issue we need face.

I apologise for going on for so long. I have tried to answer the points that have been made and shall now sit down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I intend to be very brief. I rise to explain why I will oppose this motion, in line with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who spoke for the Government.

I think the biggest danger here is that a precedent is being set. I am not by any means the oldest Member in the House—I simply chide the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who spoke from the SNP Benches—but I recall that when I first came here that it was always a requirement for every Bill to have 100 hours in Committee before the Government were allowed to bring it back to the Floor of the House with any kind of guillotine. Debate and scrutiny took place in Committee, or on the Floor of the House for that matter, at great length, as many of my right hon. and hon. Friends will remember. I think the quality of our examination of Bills was infinitely better than what followed under the subsequent Labour Government, who introduced programme motions on Bills immediately. That has meant that this House has fallen into disrepute for its inability properly to scrutinise legislation in the way it should.

We now dump everything in the other place and say blithely, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) said earlier—I say quite genuinely that he is a good friend—things will go to the Lords and, of course, we expect the Lords to tidy it up. However, we are the elected Chamber: the public have elected us to come here to hold the Government to account. We constantly say that we are here to hold the Government to account, and then we blithely say that we will let the Lords do it for us when they get the chance and that we will think about it later on.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

rose—

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I was not going to give way, because my right hon. Friend told us that we were speaking for too long, but I will give way to him.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I certainly would never accuse my right hon. Friend of speaking for too long; it was others who advised me that I was speaking for too long. I just say to him and other Members present that we are aware of the issues the Government have with the details. We have discussed with the Government, at their request, changes that would accommodate those concerns. We expressed our total willingness to include those amendments at this stage in the Commons; the Government, so far at any rate, have not come forward with those. That is why that would have to be in the Lords; I would far prefer if it were done today.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am happy to accept my right hon. Friend’s explanation for some of the rationale behind this, but if he will forgive me, I do not speak for the Government—to be fair, I have not done so for a little while, since I resigned, in case he had forgotten. I will try to speak for what I think it is like to be in opposition. I always think that Oppositions should be careful about what they wish for when they are going to be in government, because Oppositions fall upon all these mechanisms in this place. Delaying Bills is part of the reasonable rationale of an Opposition to force the Government to think again. These devices, once swept away at short notice, are swept away for good and for ill.

The Government's Plan for Brexit

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Iain Duncan Smith

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

He did. He did not succeed in having his hands not bound, and I repeat that the result was a catastrophe.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The Maastricht treaty and internal negotiations on being in the EU are wholly different from leaving the EU. The strategy for those was about remaining in the EU—all the rest was detail for debate. Here we are debating something strategically quite different: we are departing from the European Union, including the European Court of Justice and various other elements. Too much detail on that will delay the whole process and make it impossible to reach the agreement that my right hon. Friend is talking about.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I happen to agree with my right hon. Friend, but my point goes beyond that. It was never suggested, even during the Maastricht debates, that there should be a justiciable mandate. It has never been the case in the course of our island’s history that the prerogative power of making treaties was constrained by a justiciable mandate, still less in the case of a negotiation of this complexity, as my right hon. Friend has said.